The new domesticity: Fun, empowering or a step back for American women?

“When did I lose my ability to take care of myself? . . . What is simultaneously comforting and alarming about my domestic incompetence is that I am hardly alone. I’m joined by millions of women, Gen Xers and Gen Yers, who either have consciously rejected household endeavors in favor of career or, even more likely, were simply raised in the ultimate age of convenience and consumerism.”

This vision of what it means for a woman to take care of herself is either radically new or incredibly retro. Bried is a senior staff writer at a major national magazine, yet she’s framing her ability to take care of herself around her ability to bake a pie.

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Clearly, knowing how to cook (or knit, or garden) is good and useful. Some of us — myself included — find it enjoyable. But is it a moral and environmental necessity? Is it not good enough that I earn the cash to buy the jam — or the pie, or the loaf of bread, or the scarf? Do I really need to be able to can the jam myself? And if we’re raising the stakes on domestic expectations, we have to ask: Who’s doing the extra labor, men or women?

Many champions of the DIY movement explicitly say that domestic work shouldn’t be about gender. But I’ve also noticed a resurgence of old-fashioned gender essentialism from some surprising sources. I’ve lately been hearing things like “There’s just something natural about women taking on the nurturing role in the home” coming out of the mouths of women’s studies grads and Ivy League PhDs.

What used to be a reactionary right-wing view now passes as almost progressive — stuff like “We’re biologically hard-wired to do this” or “It makes evolutionary sense.” When you get too focused on the word “natural” as it applies to food, clothing and shampoo, it seems to become awfully tempting to apply it to people.

Natural or not, women are still overwhelmingly viewed as the guardians of family health and safety. And a growing number of women whom I’ve spoken to genuinely think that “do it yourself” is the best — perhaps the only — way to ensure their families’ well-being. This anxiety and the need to personally vet food and other household items has been well-noted by scholars: A large part of the return to domesticity among educated young women has to do with “a reaction against a broken food system in America,” says historian Marcie Cohen Ferris.

As a young stay-at-home mom in Pennsylvania recently told me, “The only way to know what’s in your food is to make it yourself.” A stay-at-home mom in Iowa said she wants to try home schooling her son because she’s worried about the school environment: the cleaning supplies, the food in the cafeteria.

You could say these women are simply homemakers searching for a purpose beyond driving carpool. As work-life balance scholar Joan Williams tells me, extreme domesticity can be a refuge for educated women who’ve left the workforce: “You’ve been trained your entire life in a high-pressure, high-achievement atmosphere, and you need somewhere to put that,” she says. “So you turn your household into an arena for dazzling performance.”

But these extreme DIY-ers are also voicing a fear and frustration that resonates with anyone who worries about salmonella-tainted eggs or BPA in their kid’s sippy cup. Which is to say, most of us. Their domesticity can be seen as an effort to repair on an individual level what isn’t being fixed at a governmental or societal one. Pro bono. Because, as important and fulfilling as housework may be, it’s unpaid. And in a world where college-educated women still earn, over the course of their careers, about $713,000 less than college-educated men, that’s no small thing.

Women like me are enjoying domestic projects again in large part because they’re no longer a duty but a choice. But how many moral and environmental claims can we assign to domestic work before it starts to feel, once more, like an obligation? If history is any lesson, my just-for-fun jar of jam could turn into my daughter’s chore, and eventually into my granddaughter’s “liberating” lobster strudel. And as . . . delicious as that sounds, it’s not really what I want on my holiday table in 2050.

Emily Matchar is a freelance culture writer whose work has appeared in Salon, Gourmet and Outside, among other publications. She is working on a book about “new domesticity.” She will host an online chat about this piece on Monday at 12 p.m. Submit questions before or during the discussion.

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